If Senator Lindsey Graham is correct – tomorrow the DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz will release a much anticipated review, looking into how the FBI and DOJ used an application to the FISA court to investigate the Trump campaign. There are wide-ranging opinions about what exactly this report may, or may not, outline.

The IG review has been ongoing for 21 months.  This report is anticipated to be a culmination of that investigative effort.  The ‘tick-tock club’ of Sean Hannity, Sara Carter, John Solomon and various Fox pundits have promised the report will be the most devastating outline of gross FBI and DOJ misconduct in the history of IG review.
Additionally, a network of financially dependent social media voices, book writers, podcast pundits and Q-theorists collectively known as the ‘trusty plan group’, have predicted criminal indictments, wide-scale arrests and a shock to the DC system that will fracture the foundation of the administrative state and simultaneously drain the swamp.
Meanwhile the Lawfare group has been the most visible advocacy network for the current and former DOJ and FBI officials who participated in setting up and using the FISA surveillance system now under IG review.   The Lawfare group has stated the IG report will exonerate all of their pre and post election activity; validate the justification for their predicate efforts; and leave the ‘tick-tockers’ and ‘trusty planners’ having to reconcile to their stunned audiences how they interpreted all the data so incredibly wrong.
A review of the last three IG reports which brush up against the same DOJ and FBI network: (1) IG review Clinton email/FBI conduct; (2) IG review of McCabe/media leaks; and (3) IG review of James Comey conduct; shows the IG report on FISA is likely to come down somewhere in the middle.  ie. mistakes were made; poor judgements were evident; some unprofessional conduct was found; some lack of candor was identified; department policies were not followed; but no direct evidence of intentional wrongdoing was attributable to a coordinated political effort.
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Planning for impeachment right after the 2018 mid-term election, HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff hired former SDNY U.S. Attorney Daniel Goldman (link).  You probably saw Goldman doing the questioning for Schiff during the first public impeachment hearing.  Around the same time in 2018 Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler hired Obama Administration lawyer Norm Eisen and criminal defense attorney Barry Berke (link).

In addition to changing the House rules to align with the plan, the impeachment process we have been witnessing for two months was mapped-out in the congressional lame-duck session between November 2018 and January 2019.   Today Chairman Nadler announces who will present the impeachment file during the House hearing on Monday:

(Source Link – pdf)

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HPSCI Ranking Member Devin Nunes discusses his review of phone records, and how the mysteriously collected phone data that Chariman Schiff put into his impeachment report doesn’t match with his own review.

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China controls North Korea; essentially as a proxy province.  As a result Beijing controls the messaging from the DPRK.  Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping is the captor and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un is the captive – it’s essentially a hostage dynamic.  The historic objective has been to use DPRK aggression as a hedge against the west.
Predictably there was going to come a moment when Chairman Xi realized the trade negotiations by his adversary, President Trump, were a hall of mirrors.  The U.S. President has played China by using their own panda-mask strategy against them.

President Trump achieved his goal when no-one was paying attention. The goal was a decoupling from China on economic terms.  Strategic decoupling has been underway for over a year.   There is no actual intent to reach a trade deal with China where the U.S. drops the tariffs and returns to holding hands with a happy panda playing by new rules. This fictional narrative is a figment of fantasy being sold by a financial media that cannot fathom a U.S. President would be so bold as to just walk away from China.
For almost three years U.S. President Trump has been working on two connected objectives: (1) removing the threat posed by North Korea by severing the ability of Beijing to use the proxy province as a weapon (Kim is hostage to China); and (2) deconstructing the growing economic influence of China.
Both issues are directly connected to U.S. national security; and both issues are being approached by President Trump through the use of economic leverage to achieve national security results.
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HPSCI Ranking Member Devin Nunes responds to the possibilities of how HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff gained private phone records for use in his impeachment effort.

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One of the possibilities is that Lev Parnas is a foreign national. SDNY gets a subpoena from the FISA court.  Rudy Giuliani is in contact with Parnas (1-hop). They then unmask and pull Giuliani’s records and get Nunes and Solomon (2-hops).
The question would then be how did the unmasked information in an active investigation that started in the FISC end up being sent to the House Intel Committee to be disclosed to the public?
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As the House impeachment of President Donald Trump becomes more of a forgone political conclusion it’s worth considering what terms and conditions Senate Leader Mitch McConnell will extract in order to preserve a Trump Presidency.
Most political pundits will not correctly outline the status of the possibilities, because most political pundits are willfully blind to the structure of the McConnell Senate.
First, McConnell doesn’t care about holding a majority position in the Senate.  Whether he is a majority leader or a minority leader doesn’t matter to McConnell. In fact McConnell’s political skill-set does better in the minority than the majority.
The preferred political position for Mitch McConnell is where he has between 45 and 49 republican Senators, and the Democrats hold the Majority with around 55.  Of course with Reid’s retirement, this would now be with Majority leader Chuck Schumer holding office.
Why does McConnell prefer the minority position?
The answer is where you have had to actually follow Mitch McConnell closely to see how he works.   When the Majority has around 52 to 55 seats, they need McConnell to give them 8 to 9 votes to overcome the three-fifths (60 vote) threshold for their legislative needs.  It is in the process of trade and payment for those 8 to 9 votes where McConnell makes more money, and holds more power, than as a sitting Majority Leader.
The 60 vote threshold, and McConnell’s incredible skillset in the minority, is where he shines.  Each of the needed votes to achieve sixty is worth buckets of indulgence to the minority leader.  This is why McConnell never changed the Senate rules for legislative passage.
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The CIA primarily leaks PR spin to the Washington Post.  The FBI primarily leaks PR spin to the New York Times; and the State Dept. primarily leaks PR spin to CNN.  This narrative distribution model is the one constant in an ever changing universe.
Cue the audio visual…  Obviously the prior Washington Post effort to conflate the Durham investigation with the Horowitz investigation didn’t get the desired result.  As a consequence it only took a few days before the Washington Post was back at it (Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett again) to try obfuscation 2.0; this time with Joseph Mifsud.

For three years the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN have sold the FBI claim that Professor Joseph Mifsud was a Russian operative passing information about Clinton’s emails to George Papadopoulos.
That essential point underpins their defense of the predicate for the CIA and FBI to open the July 31st investigation of the Trump campaign.   Again, for three years Joseph Mifsud was sold as a Russian operative; working on behalf of Russian interests.
That “Mifsud is a Russian asset” claim is the fulcrum of Crossfire Hurricane.   Mifsud has to be a Russian asset, or else…  George Papadopoulos talking to Australian Diplomat Alexander Downer about Mifsud is simply political gossip without merit, value or bearing.
The key point is Mifsud has to be a Russian operative in order for all of the downstream FBI activity to be justified.   If Mifsud ain’t Russian, the CIA and FBI have a problem.
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Devin Nunes appeared on Tucker Carlson to discuss the impeachment events of the day.  However, thankfully they also discussed the revelation that HPSCI Chairman Adam Schiff randomly started issuing subpoenas for telephone information.  That’s the part I find very troubling.  Notice how the media simply ignores it?  This is a pretty big damn deal.
Under what authority can congress arbitrarily send subpoenas for the private phone records of citizens, journalists, and fellow politicians?  Can Nunes now start sending subpoenas for the phone records of Michael Isikoff around the time of the Flynn phone call leak?… and can congress publish those call records as a part of some possibly inquiry into the leak… and we can cross reference to identify the FBI leaker?….

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Representative Matt Gaetz confronted the jaw-dropping level of political bias and Trump Derangement Syndrome exhibited by Chairman Nadler’s panel of left-wing experts.
With a visible display of righteous indignation Mr. Gaetz dressed down the pompous liberal law professor, Pamela Karlan, and cut right to the heart of the matter with the entire panel.  WATCH:

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Professor Pamela Karlan of Stanford Law School became the pompous face of the academic impeachment panel today when she ridiculed the son of President Trump in an effort to highlight her resistance bona-fides.   Imagine the hate that necessarily exists in the heart of a witness who would rehearse such a line to gain tribal cheer.

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Professor Karlan’s tone-deaf effort is a result of a life in an echo-chamber of far-left liberalism. However, the exhibited hatred did more to support the argument of the impeachment opposition than a thousand hours of granular testimony.  Karlan’s disposition during her diatribe is a case study in Trump Derangement Syndrome.

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